to find a home
by Aurylie
Summary: She burns the ticket in their fireplace that night while police officers and social workers move through the kitchen behind her, and wonders what it is like to know you are dying. Dreams of dark eyed men will haunt her for the rest of her youth.


**Thank you guys for your consistent support! You're the best, and I hope you enjoy this one-shot.**

**Disclaimer: CBS owns everything.**

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In the beginning, there is silence.

The officer's words fall past her ears at uneven intervals, and she feels something curling inside her chest that she cannot explain.

"_There was nothing we could do."_

She can almost feel her father's cool hands on her cheek then, and she fingered her movie ticket restlessly in her pocket. There are people shifting around her, voices low, and sometimes they will touch her shoulder softly in apologies for what has happened. Her eyes are distant and they will wonder if this is what it feels like when you witness someone's last moments. A car that disappeared in flames and the daughter that will never know anything more than anyone would dare to tell her.

She burns the ticket in their fireplace that night while police officers and social workers move through the kitchen behind her, and wonders what it is like to know you are dying.

Dreams of dark eyed men will haunt her for the rest of her youth.

xxx

Her Aunt takes her in. And it is here that Kensi learns the difference between a house and a home, between relatives and family. The pictures are all black and white and she herself is some shade of gray that her cousins do not understand.

She finds pieces of herself in all the places she'd thought she'd lost. Under the bed where the monsters once hid and on the side of every highway where no light should ever shine but somehow found a way. Her heart feels cold at night and she cannot scream because she is scared of all the answers she's always wanted.

Her oldest cousin fades away in the roar of an Army jet and that is when she learns that saying goodbye does not make it hurt less. Her Uncle hides behind the paper and Kensi walks past their mailbox on a Tuesday and never comes back.

Months later, someone mails her a wrinkled newspaper clipping with a familiar face and empty words. She burns it in her empty apartment, because it is all she knows how to do.

xxx

She wanders mostly. For a year or two, and then she turns twenty one and is so lonely that it hurts when she breaths in too deeply. The parking lots are always full and the only time she cries is when the shower is on. She falls asleep to the warmth of another and wakes up when they leave in the early morning hours.

This is a cycle and this is familiar and she regrets most everything she does nowadays, so it makes little difference whether or not she is proud of what she has become.

The alarm rings on the sixth anniversary of her father's death and she realizes that what she wants more than anything is peace.

So she joins a local police force, and learns that peace is relative and that there are many ways to suffer.

It gets harder the longer she stays.

Longing to lose herself in the search for a kind of justice she cannot define.

xxx

The hallway is dark and the TV flickers through commercials silently.

Back against the wall, she moves quickly, because she can feel the footsteps of a stranger somewhere behind her. Her shoes leave soft reminders of where she has been in the dust.

The footsteps stop and a door shuts and she realizes that she has always been alone in this journey anyways.

There is a body on the armchair, hand white around the remote. Infomercials that only illuminate the damage that has already been done, and they are too late anyways. She is not strong enough to do anything but leave.

Calls her boss and sits on the sidewalk for reinforcements.

There is blood on her hands when they arrive, and she could not tell them where from.

xxx

It does not get better for a very long time.

Through the biting winds that stain her cheeks red and the tombstone that cracks under the ice and ceases to be anything more than a reminder of all she has failed.

There are stars she cannot she.

There are cases she cannot solve.

So she tucks them away in the hole that her heart cannot fix and waits for a time when turning on the lights really makes her feel safe.

And it does not get better for a very long time.

xxx

Her bathroom mirror glares back at her, and she knows that this should be a moment of truth but it seems to have fallen flat. Her clock clicks somewhere beyond the locked door, but she does not know the time and cannot find the energy to care.

She is running out of corners to duck into, and the smoke has stopped stinging her eyes. The movie has ended and the ship still sunk, no matter how hard they tried to save it.

There was only ever one way for it to end and it never lets her down.

The distance between who she is and what she believes has become too great to cross, and the nightmares do not end in the morning because they do not haunt her dreams, but her reality.

They never ask her to prove to them how happy she is, and so she never does.

And she comes to thrive in silent expectations and opinions she does not share.

xxx

The stars blink back at her solemnly.

She looks back with a kind of fondness she cannot fake. She wonders how many heartbreaks they have witnessed, how many years of sadness and how many empty lives they have watched pass by. And they are steady and comforting in the way that they never change.

Hidden by the light of day, and she crouches behind lost explanations. Sometimes they fall, but they are break taking in their tumble, as where she only bleeds her remorse.

She admires them as she admires people and as she longs for a place to belong. They make her feel small, but at least they make her feel.

It is so easy to be nothing that sometimes they forget to be anything else.

xxx

She might have died on the floor of a bank, had the men behind the masks not been friends, and had she not been wearing a vest that undoubtedly saved her life. The bracelets made her wrist itch, and the gunshots against her heart knocked her breath straight out of her lungs and her shooters did not cringe.

The blood that was not hers, was not anyone's really, was sticky on the tile floor, and she watched her chest bleed out.

Renko helps her to her feet once the job is done, and leaves her behind with a half-smile and a promise that they both know they will not keep.

It does not hurt.

xxx

She dreams that she is running through a warehouse, skidding around corners, the walls marked with red streaks that make her queasy. There is the taste of copper in her mouth, her lip is bleeding and her wrist sticks out at a funny angle. There is someone running after her, but she does not turn around to find out whom. She trips, toppling over the body in her way, and lands sideways next to it.

It is Dom.

His eyes are empty in the cruelest sort of way. Accusing and pained, she can almost feel his loneliness seeping through her skin, and she reaches out desperately to confirm what she already knows. He is dead dead dead, like her father and partner and boyfriend, lost to a world that she cannot save him from.

Slowly, he crumbles into dust before her eyes, drifting away into the darkness of the hall.

She can feel the footsteps rushing towards her as she lies on the stone floor, but does not move. Dom's voice inside her head, his face beneath her eyelids, and the pulsing sense of failure that will not leave the tips of her fingers, the hollow of her chest, and she feels herself burning away.

She always wakes up before they finally reach her, shooting up short of breath and anxious to find her missing partner.

She wonders if maybe they could save her from the mess that is her mind.

But Dom dies on a rooftop, and she never finds out.

xxx

She might have died in the living room of a misguided man, bleeding out over a tarp next to the couch. She sees Callen and Sam through the window and is relieved, calling out their names as they barge through the front door. Her wrists are bound and she stumbles several times in the ensuing moments of chaos, but she is alive and she is grateful. The blade against her neck reminded her of other moments that could have been her last, and of all the times she wished they were.

In the moments when life was more difficult than she believed she could handle, but came out fighting anyways. When she became more than anyone expected her to be and did not back down because she did not know how. Her father was dead and her mother was gone and she knew more about funerals than she was entitled to, but she was strong and she had found a sort-of family and she believed in them so desperately that she _did not want to die._

Deeks is new and he is daring. He does not quite fill the hole that Dom left, but he begins to dig out his own, and she is almost sad when she drops him off for what could be that last time later that night.

He promises to be back.

And maybe it is her shock from being alive, and maybe it is the fading echo of bullets still ringing in her ear, but she trusts him in a way she cannot explain.

She locks her door that night.

But she does not hide from her reflection.

xxx

He returns in a haze of explosions that bring her back to an uglier time.

And he has kept his promise in an off sort of way, but she fears he may have lost himself somewhere along the way and she cringes.

She cannot find the right words because she has never had them.

They begin unsteadily.

But at least they begin.

xxx

This is the wrong time to be admiring the Russian man's perfect English, but Kensi does regardless.

She has lived behind a wall of guilt for long enough to recognize the emotion growing behind her partner's eyes. Her breath is shallow, and her hand shakes, but she knows he will get her back, and she tells him so.

The Russians are moody and broken in ways even she cannot understand. Their eyes are fractured and panicked because their phone is not ringing with news they want to hear, and the little black book she has never seen continues to not exist.

They shove her into a corner and press a button. The room glows with red beams that make her want to cry, and she has not stopped shaking since she left Deeks behind.

Trapped behind barriers that she cannot see, and she knows they must be watching, wherever they are.

_Getmeoutofhere_

The thought is burning, and she thinks that she might collapse from the stress. Every muscle is on lockdown because she can already hear the ticking of a bomb from somewhere behind her.

Deeks saves her, because they are partners and because they are friends. Because he trembles as she bends around the lasers that could kill them both, and holds her hand before they both leap across the threshold of the room, aided by the force of the flames.

Sam's voice barely registers in her clouded mind, her only focus on Deeks' eyes, filled with the shock of what could have just happened. Alive in ways that maybe she has never been, because she could not have done it alone, and she did not have to.

She cannot tell him in words how thankful she is.

She thinks he understands anyway.

xxx

Kensi runs from ghosts that are not haunting her because she is used to it.

And the world is full of long walks to nowhere and constellations that are not defined by maps and coordinates because they do not have to be. She dreams of Dom and she watches her father slip away from a world that he did not belong in. Her boyfriend and her old partner and every victim that has fallen from her own gun. She is not alone in this suffering, and she realizes this slowly.

Every secret that is not hers to tell, and everything she has forced herself to forget.

She is finding a pathway home.

She will be okay.

**xxx**


End file.
